Compressed Data; Alexa's Crusade Continues Under Amazon.com's Flag

By LAURIE J. FLYNN

Published: May 3, 1999

It began as a crusade: to archive for posterity the entire contents of the World Wide Web, which had reached some 13 trillion bytes at the latest count.

But last week, this crusade by Brewster Kahle had a big commercial payoff. His three-year-old company, Alexa Internet, was acquired by the on-line retailer Amazon.com for nearly $300 million.

Alexa's Internet software is part Web browser, part navigation service; users download free from the Alexa.com Web site. After that, whenever the user calls up any Web page, the software lists four other recommended sites, based on the Web searching patterns of other Alexa users.

Mr. Kahle calls the approach contextual navigation, and Netscape Communications, which is owned by America Online, has folded Alexa into the latest version of its browser. While questions remain about what Amazon.com intends to do with Alexa and its technology, Mr. Kahle insists that the acquisition will give his company plenty of independence.

''We're trying to be part of the Internet infrastructure, much like the search engines have become,'' he said.

Mr. Kahle, who was a founder of the supercomputer company Thinking Machines in 1983, moved on to the Internet search business. In 1989, well before the World Wide Web took hold, he developed the Wide Area Information Server -- or WAIS -- for searching distant data bases on the Internet. Mr. Kahle sold that company, WAIS Inc., to America Online three years ago for $15 million in stock, which he used to bankroll Alexa Internet.

Amazon.com has said it will let Alexa continue operating as a separate company with its own headquarters in San Francisco, rather than folding it into the Amazon.com corporate structure and moving it to Seattle, as the company has done with nearly every other acquisition.

The name Alexa refers to the library of Alexandria, where the ancient Greeks tried to amass the world's knowledge. Mr. Kahle said his deal included a promise by Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, to let him continue Alexa's ambitious project to archive the Internet.

Last year, Alexa provided the Library of Congress with a first installment -- 44 tapes containing 2 trillion bytes of Web data, the equivalent of 500,000 Web pages. Of course, since the Web continues to grow by thousands of pages a day, cataloguing it all could be a never-ending task.